Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to artificially intelligent collections of robots and more particularly to robotic swarming.
Description of the Related Art
Robotics refers to the interdisciplinary branch of engineering and science that includes mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, computer science, and others and address the design, construction, operation, and use of robots, as well as computer systems for the control, sensory feedback, and information processing in a robot. The aggregation of the foregoing technologies ultimately may be used to develop machines that can substitute for humans. Initially, single robot systems were developed to perform very specific tasks and in many cases, included a mere articulating art with a tool disposed thereon such that the movement arm could be programmatically coordinated yet autonomous in that the arm could respond to sensed conditions.
More recently, multi-robot systems have come of age where in a multiplicity of different robots operate in a coordinated fashion to achieve a specific goal. Swarm robotics is a new approach to the coordination of a multi-robot system that involves large numbers of simple physical robots. Swarm robotics capitalizes upon artificial swarm intelligence so as to produce a desired collective behavior from the interactions between the simple physical robots and interactions of the simple physical robots with the surrounding environment. In swarm robotics, the individual robots follow very simple rules, and although there is no centralized control structure dictating how individual robots should behave, local, and to a certain degree random, interactions between the robots lead to the emergence of “intelligent” global behavior, unknown to the individual robots.